Escape the elephant graveyard

The search for unsocial media

Now that Facebook has become the elephant graveyard of boomers searching for their lost youth, and Reddit and Imgur are full of trolls and creepers looking for a joke of the day, where on the internet can we go that our grandparents won’t follow?

— Henry

Yeah, people have pretty much broken the internet at this point. Between parents stalking their kids, and kids acting like idiots, where’s a sensible young gent supposed to go for a bit of stimulating content? 4chan might still be “safe.” Old and young people remain somewhat scared to use it, in both cases because delicious cake. You should probably look that one up on your own time.

Maybe you should take your life metaphorically offline? More and more of us are doing it — unplugging from the grid. By that, I mean all or partly disconnecting from Facebook in favor of less-social social media. Consider Instagram. Instagram removes the faulty pretense of “socialization” from social media, creating a platform for self-expression of limited depth and limitless propagation. Much like the insatiable urge to pickle everything in sight, Instagramming a sunset, for example, hearkens back to a simpler time, the days when Ma and Pa Hipster would sit on the front stoop and contemplate the sinking sun, Mason jars of small-batch whiskey in hand, snugly wrapped in flannel shirts and newsboy caps against the chill of the Williamsburg evening. There’s a refreshing earnestness in communicating with the concentrated purity of a single-origin espresso, and it appeals to our not-misguided quest for authenticity without the burden of hard labor.

Comments

Oh, dear God. Are young people seriously too resistant to socializing to handle FACEBOOK now? Wasn't it less than a decade ago that people were complaining that Facebook and Myspace were built for people who cannot handle real life socializing?! Now young people refuse to handle the responsibility of being part of a world friendly enough for FACEBOOK?

Why? Young and old San Diegans need to start understanding that humans need social contact. Therefore, being social is a basic responsibility to oneself and others.